Kim Kardashian Averages Twice as Many Retweets as the President, M.I.T. Researchers Estimate

More culturally depressing news about Kim Kardashian and the continued downfall of the American empire. A team of M.I.T. researchers has cleverly developed a formula to predict how often a person’s tweets will be retweeted—a formula that, we imagine, could help advertisers willing to pay $20,000 for a celebrity to write in 140-character increments about their specific lip gloss (above).

Tauhid Zaman, a professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, has posted a 28-page P.D.F. on the study, if you are interested in failing to understand the highly scientific details. (Tip of the hat to Silicon Beat for bringing this to our attention). In it is an explanation of “The Twouija: Retweet Oracle,” a prediction tool that can be used to estimate a celebrity’s rate of being retweeted. Sadly, the Twouija predicts that Kim Kardashian will generate 600 retweets in the 50 minutes following a tweet, while President Barack Obama will generate slightly more than 300 in the same amount of time, seriously diminishing his ability to make a formidable second living off of sunless bronzer lotions. For comparison purposes, the tool also estimates that Eva Longoria generates just over 140 retweets in the first 50 minutes after posting a tweet, while Newt Gingrich generates a respectable 50.